


don't ask why

by Arokel



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: A conspicuous lack of the continuous tense, But mostly fluff, I genuinely don't know what this is, Jaskier | Dandelion Loves Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Light Angst, M/M, My brain was very quiet when I wrote it, One might say a dearth, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 11:21:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29873883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/Arokel
Summary: Geralt holds his tongue and watches Jaskier’s eyes glint in the firelight and wonders how long they have until he has to miss this.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	don't ask why

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a self-indulgent drabble with absolutely no plot or coherent structure, but it's been a minute since I wrote anything and tbh it probably shows but I was Struck By Inspiration and here we are. I've only watched the show but this fic is so tenuously related to anything canon-adjacent that it really doesn't matter.
> 
> So anyway fuck the continuous tense; I hope you enjoy it.

Sometimes Geralt forgets what nights were like before Jaskier joined them. Quieter, and less of a hassle to set up camp for only one person instead of two. But beyond that…

He wouldn’t call it lonely, because to be lonely you have to know there’s something you’re missing. Before Jaskier, he hadn’t known there was anything on the road besides solitude. Lamentable, Jaskier would call that. Pitiable. Not pitiful, but deserving of pity. Geralt has never found it something worth lamenting over.

But now, with Jaskier at his side day and night, he can admit that a traveling companion adds something to his life that, were it to depart again, he would come to miss after all. Without Jaskier, he would be… lonely. An odd thing, for a witcher.

Jaskier, for his part, seems to have no inclination to leave, though Geralt knows someday he must, one way or another. Age, sickness, the inevitable consequence of following Geralt so closely into danger. Perhaps he’ll grow out of it and settle down, find a free-spirited woman and an ever-colorful city and leave the monotony of Geralt’s world behind.

Geralt will miss him, then.

Some nights he wants to ask, with the fire between them and Jaskier’s eyes the only thing he can see, but he knows Jaskier would never answer honestly. _Why, so anxious to marry me off and be rid of me? I’m hurt, Geralt. Is that any way to treat your oldest friend?_

Jaskier isn’t Geralt’s oldest anything. But he is old enough now to keep his feelings to himself, if he wants to, and so Geralt holds his tongue and watches Jaskier’s eyes glint in the firelight and wonders how long they have until he has to miss this.

* * *

Jaskier leaves him sometimes, for days or weeks or months, but time moves differently for Geralt and what feels like seconds to him could be years. But each time, Jaskier comes back, and each time he behaves as if he never left at all, save to bemoan whatever doomed love affair sent him shamefaced back to Geralt’s side. Geralt waits for the day those seconds turn to decades, and does not thank those women who delay the inevitable by breaking Jaskier’s ever-generous heart.

Jaskier is away for three years, and when he returns, all he says is, “I tried.” The planes of his face are shadowed in the fading light, and Geralt watches him and does not ask why he failed.

* * *

Jaskier is thirty or thereabouts, with all the subtle signs of aging that number affords, but in the flickering light of the fire his skin is smooth and unshadowed by anything but the night. He has returned, and in the dark beneath the canopy of firs, it is as if age has never touched him. As if he is still the same man he has always been.

“You’ve never been in love,” Jaskier says. He is on his back, head tipped up to the sliver of sky above him, but Geralt knows his eyes are closed. This is Jaskier thinking aloud, working through yet another song or poem or pet theory. He does not expect or need a response.

Geralt gives him one anyway. “What gave you that impression?”

“Just a hunch.” Jaskier’s teeth flash bright in the golden glow in a self-satisfied grin, his voice mild and amused. “Have you ever thought you were?”

Geralt thinks. He has never been given license to love; first by the Path, then by the world that values him only what services he can provide it. Before Jaskier, he can’t even say he truly liked anyone.

“Because I just wonder,” Jaskier continues, “if maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time.”

Here is where Geralt would bite his tongue, any other of the many nights Jaskier has begun a conversation and decided not to finish it. But he hears Jaskier’s regretful voice on _I tried_ , and instead of doing what he has always done, he asks, “how so?”

Jaskier opens his eyes. Geralt can’t see it, but he hears the flutter of Jaskier’s eyelashes against his cheek and the heavy, melancholy beating of his heart. “I think perhaps,” Jaskier says slowly, “that many people have loved me, and I thought that meant I loved them back.”

Geralt isn’t surprised by this conclusion, though it’s not one he would have come to himself without ever having seen Jaskier’s behavior around those many people. But Jaskier gives his heart so freely, so readily, and Geralt has sometimes jealously wondered if any of it is real. Perhaps the reason Jaskier always comes back is that he hasn’t yet found anything worth staying away.

“I’ve never given it much thought,” Geralt says. “Has something happened to change your mind?”

Jaskier stares at the sky.

* * *

Slowly, Jaskier stops leaving. Geralt doesn’t notice, at first, but then a full summer has gone by and Jaskier hasn’t detoured once. It’s only as the leaves begin to turn and Jaskier stars to shiver in his bedroll even beside the fire that Geralt realizes they have passed a full season together.

“If I had a wife and a home I’d be warmer,” Jaskier mutters as he tugs Geralt’s cloak tighter around himself. Someday he will find those things, Geralt thinks, a mantra that loses a little of its certainty with every slow-running year that deepens the lines on Jaskier’s face. Someday he will find someone to keep him warm with more than just a cloak.

“Do you want that?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier laughs, teeth-chattering and wry. “With who?”

It’s selfish to hope that Jaskier never finds out, but as Geralt rises to cross the fire and lay beside Jaskier, he hopes anyway.

* * *

“Sometimes,” Jaskier says, as Geralt wraps his swollen hand in linen, “I almost think you really do like me.”

Geralt doesn’t allow himself to smile, even when Jaskier flexes his fingers and hisses in pain. He won’t give Jaskier the satisfaction of smiling at such an outworn joke.

“It’s only that I haven’t left you in peace in over a year, and you’ve yet to tell me to fuck off.” Jaskier’s gaze on Geralt’s face is uncertain, as if he expects this to be the moment it happens, now that it’s been spoken. As if he really does take it as a given that Geralt only tolerates him.

“I assumed you’d hare off again the next time you fell in love for a few months,” Geralt says; shrugs, as if he wouldn’t miss Jaskier if he did.

Jaskier laughs, stilted and hollow. “Ah. No. No, I don’t think so. I’ve done some self-reflection, and you’re stuck with me for a while, I’m afraid.”

Geralt wants to ask again what happened to prompt such a drastic change of heart, but Jaskier’s expression is pinched and unhappy, and Geralt can do nothing but grip his uninjured hand and try not to feel relieved.

He will miss Jaskier someday, he knows. But not yet.

* * *

Sometimes, Geralt thinks about love. Not Jaskier’s kind of love, the kind that always seems to end with his tail between his legs and a rueful song to sing. He thinks of the love Jaskier once asked him about, something he has never felt and wouldn’t know to name if he did. He wonders if Jaskier ever answered his own question.

He never asks.

* * *

They pass by a farmhouse with a beaten-dirt field in front of it, and Jaskier pauses in his tracks to watch it for several minutes before he continues on. Geralt wonders what he sees when he looks at it.

“I almost got married. In a barn like that one,” Jaskier says. He keeps his eyes on the road, but Geralt now knows that he saw in that abandoned building the life he could have lived.

A life he could have lived, and never sang about. Geralt blinks. He has never heard any woeful tales of almost-marriages. All he has heard are rich widows, jealous husbands or angry fathers, and one opaque, ambiguous _I tried._

“What happened?” Why did it fail?

Jaskier shrugs. “She left me at the altar. Or, well, she told me she would if I didn’t start being honest with myself and call it off. She said she’d rather jilt me then than be jilted later down the line.”

This, then, must have been that _I tried._ This was Jaskier’s last, greatest attempt at falling in love like ordinary people do. Geralt wishes he could ask what Jaskier learned, when he walked away from that other barn and began to search his own soul. But he doesn’t. He thinks Jaskier still would not answer honestly, if he asked.

“So you see, I’m just not cut out for that sort of thing. One rejection too many, you know? Really makes you rethink your priorities,” Jaskier says lightly, and he looks up at Geralt with bright, dancing eyes. “I’ve taken after you, it seems. Not one to fall in love after all.”

Geralt has the oddest sense that Jaskier is lying. As he pulls Roach into a trot and leaves Jaskier behind, he wonders who that lie might be hiding; who might take Jaskier away from him.

* * *

“That’s a love song,” Geralt says. He watches across the fire as Jaskier’s fingers still on the strings of his lute.

“Astute as always, Geralt.”

It’s a warning, a brush-off, but Geralt presses onward. His tongue smarts with years of biting it and his voice is hoarse as he says, “I thought you’d sworn off love.”

The whites of Jaskier’s eyes flash in the firelight and his reply, when it comes, is flippant. “One doesn’t have to be in love to write a love song. I’ve always been quite good at it.” His fingers nervously against the body of the lute and he hesitates, face shadowed and opaque. “I would have thought it would be harder, now. Guess that means I really never was.”

Geralt almost asks how he can tell, what opened his eyes and how he knows differently now. He almost asks whether Jaskier is going to leave again.

Jaskier smiles at him and the words die on his aching tongue. “Shall I play it for you in full?”

The song holds no answers, but Geralt has grown used to the sound of Jaskier’s voice against the hush of night and the crackling fire. It’s what he misses most, when Jaskier goes away.

It’s a very good love song.

* * *

Jaskier leaves as Geralt has always known he would. He offers no explanation, just a sad, rueful, “I tried.”

Geralt thinks of an empty barn and Jaskier’s fingers on the strings of his lute and can’t bring himself to ask why it failed. “Not in love, then?”

Jaskier smiles at him, achingly kind. “Not in any way that matters.”

“How, then?”

It doesn’t make any sense. Jaskier has only ever left Geralt in favor of the company of other people, before. To be left just because something in Geralt himself is wanting makes Geralt feel very small. What has taken Jaskier from him this time, if not something like love? What kind of love, in Jaskier’s estimation, doesn’t matter?

“ _Now_ he asks,” Jaskier says, to no one, and doesn’t answer. Geralt doesn’t know why, but he knows he can’t change it. All those times he has bitten his tongue have amounted to nothing, because Jaskier will leave anyway and Geralt still has no answers.

He wants to ask, even if it’s too late, how Jaskier knows what love is to know he hasn’t felt it before. He wants a name for the loneliness he feels already, before Jaskier has even left. He wants Jaskier to stay.

Jaskier looks at his feet. His fingers worry at the strap of his back like lute strings, a faint farewell song Geralt can almost hear in remembered notes and the smell of woodsmoke. “If you had asked,” he says, “I would have told you.”

It’s not an invitation.

“Sometimes you have to wait around for someone who doesn’t love you back to know what loving really means,” Jaskier says. And then he leaves.

* * *

Seasons pass like seconds, or like decades. Geralt can’t count them properly. Time is all one and the same without Jaskier there to fill the days, and it’s easier to let them pass uncounted than know exactly how long Jaskier has been away.

Geralt misses him. He sets up his lonely camp and stares at the sky and imagines he can hear the quiet thrum of strings in the dark. He hopes Jaskier is safe and warm somewhere, in a cottage on the coast with someone who loves him back.

Geralt could have been that person. If he had known sooner what it was like to lose Jaskier, he wouldn’t have stood by while Jaskier walked out of his life. If he hadn’t been too afraid of missing Jaskier eventually to ask him to stay, he wouldn’t be missing Jaskier now.

He doesn’t know what love is to name it. He has never been in love, just like Jaskier had never been in love before he spent years following Geralt in silence. But Geralt thinks he could learn, if Jaskier came back.

* * *

Jaskier returns to him as the ferns unfurl and the crocuses bloom, and when he grins at Geralt and says, “I tried,” Geralt doesn’t ask what he means.

The spring is warm and the sky is clear, and the dying embers between them gild Jaskier’s face in the russets and pinks of a sunset Geralt hasn’t seen yet. Someday, Jaskier will leave him for good and the world will be a little darker, but for now, Geralt listens to the faint hum of his voice and watches his face and finds within himself the courage to ask.

“Why did you come back?”

Jaskier closes his eyes and tilts his chin to the sky, and the melody of his sigh winds itself through Geralt’s lungs. “Sometimes, love means staying.”


End file.
